I think your mistake here is saying that observing how cultural moral norms are selected is in their ability to solve universal cooperation problems for everyone. That is simply not what is observed. Rather we see many instances of cultural moral norms that are selected to strengthen cooperation in the in group, while dominating the out group. — PhilosophyRunner

Yep. We keep coming back to the idea that cooperation is not of itself a sound or neutral moral position, but may be used to dominate, subjugate and murder. Are there not ethical considerations or questions that need to be asked before one can get to morality as a cooperation strategy? Which cooperation strategies are morally virtuous and which ones are not? How can we tell?

We simply don’t realize that so much of what we think we know, who we listen to, the company we keep, the jobs we do, and how we generally live our lives, is determined by factors beyond our control — the time and place you are born, your genes, your parents and upbringing, your culture and peers, early life experiences, education, etc. — Mikie

I was drawn to Marxism as a kid because it seemed obvious to me that the way society is organized rewards some people and debilitates and destroys others. This curated unfairness seems to some people to be a 'natural order' and even as an instantiation of freedom. For me everything else flows from this modest (social justice) insight. Humans believe things because they are born in particular zip codes and because they are socialized to accept particular values. We are all products of forces beyond our control - not just those of geopolitics and economics, but the ideas and very language we use to communicate. Trying to work out which parts to ditch; which parts are really you is the challenge.

One can see the attraction of mysticism and spirituality to the avant-garde set and counter culture movement which sought to break out of all this via transcendence, even if much of this project was theatrical, smug and had its own forms of elitism. I was connected to groups like this through the 1980's.

I wonder to what extent the stuff we read and write about is simply a product of our class, our parents class and education, and our upbringings — Mikie

Most of it I would have thought. Still, mustn't grumble. I'm not looking for transcendence or glimpses into the ultimate truth (surely a human construct) and would probably settle for a good cup of tea over all that.

it feels like denying the truth. — Darkneos

Talk me through it.

That's not actually what it was about... — Darkneos

Didn't say it was. I was riffing off the seemingly endless question about what is real which is foundational to the OP.

Right. Here's a more pithy question. What then is real rather than invented story? — javra

That's the underlying question of many an OP, regardless of the ostensible topic.

My own view is we don't get to the really real or the truthy truth, we just arrive at provisionally useful truths or realities about our environment, many of which seem to work and have practical consequences. I don't have commitments to any form of transcendental truth, or that science will one day explain everything.

Sounds like you are not following the conversation I was having with BC. Don't worry about it.

Loosely speaking, the OP is about what is real. I agreed with BC's point that humans are meaning making creatures who invent stories to help manage their environment. (Richard Rorty holds a similar view.) Some of those stories work better in some texts than others. And some of those stories, like the one in the OP, might be borne out of having too much spare time.

I'm not sure what you're talking about but I would include scientism as one of those bedtime stories.

Interesting - esp the Hegel/Marx material. Vey nicely expressed.

Once we have the leisure to roast domestic rabbits, we start spinning out interesting ideas about gods, illusion, Maya, the Trinity, Karma, and so on. Some of this thinking is not illusory, it's delusional. Our - perhaps - overly intellectual brains seem to need a certain amount of delusional thinking to put up with life. Otherwise, some people find reality terrifying. — BC

We certainly seem to need and cherish our bedtime stories.

But it's not important if you're not interested. What could it matter, if it doesn't matter to you? — Janus

I don't think it is accurate to assume that if someone has no experience of the numinous they are not interested in what people think it is.

If you want to let go, then you must practice, but you would need incentive. — Janus

Just briefly, what do you mean by practice or incentive?

See my response to praxis above. I'm not taking about holding any ontology, but rather about letting go of all ontologies and concerns about ontology in order to experience the numinous; to see that all experience is, primordially, prior to subject and object and all the linguistically generated dualities that flow on from that. — Janus

Ok. I don't think I have any idea of the numinous but I get your general point. I suppose I wonder how long does one sit in this 'letting go-ness' and where does it take you? Are you suggesting perhaps some kind of meditative experience with some eventual form of enlightenment?

This notion that - all experience is, primordially, prior to subject and object and all the linguistically generated dualities that flow on from that - seems to be arrived at through conscious judgment and rationality.

So I sort of wonder if it's possible for a more philosophical version to take off. — Moliere

My experience is that people usually find philosophy to be a turn off for reasons mentioned in OP's here often enough.

New Atheism was more of a publishing, marketing phenomenon and a poor label to describe a wave of renewed interest in secular polemics.

I think those people who are susceptible to philosophy will read Hitchens (or whoever) and move on to something meatier if they already have or develop a taste for critical thinking and the history of ideas.

I see ignorance as consisting, not in holding one view rather than another (except in the empirical context) but in being wedded to some (necessarily dualistic) view or other. For me sin, or "missing the mark", consists in not seeing the world non-dually. — Janus

Maybe I have you wrong but isn't this the kind of dogmatic position you were speaking against earlier? What do you mean by seeing the world non-dually? Do you mean holding a monist ontology like idealism?

Maybe with a light sabre?

Your claim is that we cannot have veridical access to the tree. I have sufficient access to it to be able to prune it. — Banno

I think this may be my favourite line here so far.

Cool, thanks, that's interesting to hear and I would have thought this (realism vs the others) was a perennial and serious philosophical question, but glad to hear it may not be the case. My big problem in all this is not knowing how significant the use or role of language is in all these confusions and categorisations.

My diagnosis is that hereabouts - that is, on this forum - there are folk who begin by dividing things into a private world and a public world. They sometimes phrase this as internal vs external, or object vs subject, first person vs third person, and so on. They then proceed to conclude that there are two worlds, or to collapse the whole of the "external" world to some internal characteristic - the will, for example. they think they have presented an argument for one of the varieties of idealism when all they have done is to assume idealism. — Banno

The role assumption plays in these kinds of discussions is fascinating. Cheers - T

I got there from this site which has really broadened my range of understanding - limited though it remains. So thank you! :pray:

because of cupidity — Wayfarer

The song's wrong, it's cupidity, not money which makes the world go around...

Meanwhile one of the consequences of Trump's election lies is determination on the part of many lower-level election officials to reinforce and safeguard free and fair elections. It's becoming quite a grass-roots movement throughout the US. — Wayfarer

Hope so.

I wish one of the other consequences was the elevation of truth in politics.

The self is the overarching temporally extended narrative construct of a necessarily embodied and social consciousness which turns the animal acting in an environment into a subject. It is that through which the individual recognizes that it is one of many, i.e., an individual in a society of individuals, which are also selves. The self is that which recognizes itself as a self in a world of selves.* — Jamal

Very nice.

I don’t think it’s “immaterial”, but I don’t think it’s all about the brain, though having a brain is no doubt helpful. — Jamal

Yes, I think embodied cognition is a crucial part of this. As George Lakoff says, the mind is inherently embodied - a brain with no body can't interact and can't become a self.

“...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

Interesting brief John Searle chapter on direct realism and what he considers to be recurring mistakes in philosophy.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328147585_The_Philosophy_of_Perception_and_the_Bad_Argument_Sprachtheoretische_und_interdisziplinare_Aspekte_einer_brisanten_Alternative

Thanks and I think this may be a good summary of Wittgenstein's approach. My only question is should we take this methodology seriously? It sometimes reads like it's merely shuffling words around.

"'So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?' It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life." — Richard B

Move over post-modernism. For those who wish to understand perception and the nature of the real, I suspect this approach is unlikely to satisfy.

Most of our problems in philosophy seem to stem from 'as they really are'.

I was hoping you'd drop by. Is your take on the conversation about realism informed by Austin and Searle?

My memory is that you would have no truck with the idea of a tree 'as it is in itself', finding this qualifier redundant.

Do you agree with Searle's account of 'the bad argument' as being a key fallacy driving these sorts of discussions that inevitable end up talking about visual illusions, etc?

Is there a fallacy found in that we are not seeing the seeing, the visual experience?

What do you say to the person who asserts that when a human regards an object, that object is to a greater or lesser extent created in the experience of perception, which brings with it anticipatory notions and memories, along with a particular cognitive apparatus which sees colours and other attributes which are present in the experience of looking but not in the object being seen. I've never known where one can stop with this (idealism I guess) and why it matters, except as a problematic foundational argument for a particular ontological position.

Before I had studied Ch’an [Zen] for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.
— Qingyuan Weixin

(I assume as a matter of course that all here are at the 'before' stage, myself included of course.) — Wayfarer

There's something very archetypal about that formulation: the quotidian/the higher awareness/the quotidian And comforting...

:up: Fascinating stuff.

Seemingly, the masses go to vote just for trivial aspects rather than asking to the politicians more effectiveness. We live in a period of time where it is more important for a politician to have a good spotlight than a great rethoric. — javi2541997

I've generally never seen it much different than this, it's just that each generation's trivialities seem more grotesque that the last.

AFAIK, so far only De Santis & Individual-1 (less and less) ... they're also looking for anyone who the MAGA mouth-breathers will support. Like Pence (who's delusional), Haley ain't one of them. — 180 Proof

I'm not across this issue - living elsewhere - but this seems on the money. Trump still has a hold of a significant chunk of the GOP. Do you think De Santis will be a bigger problem than Trump - being more disciplined and focused?

Being someone who likes flow charts more than chapters, I would like to see a chart expressing what each philosophical position holds is responsible for a human being seeing/experiencing a tree - in simple and direct language.

All this of course ends up in metaphysics or ontology... or both.

But I just gave you the fact that the brain is doing stuff (that is the interpretation), so it is indirectly accessing the tree, as it filters through that process.. which by the way, if I haven't stated it, is a human process. — schopenhauer1

Indeed. And in this argument it might be posited that via this 'human process' is built-in neuro-cognitive schema that impose what we think is reality upon the external world - in the Kantian sense, I guess, that time and space may not have a reality outside of human experience and are part of our sense making apparatus, etc.

This can all get highly complex when you add in intentional states and the work of direct realists like Putnam and Searle - none of whom I understand very well.

Then of course there is idealism, which would dissolve the entire problem of realism/antirealism and claim that while what we see is 'real' it is not what we think. Reality is the the product of consciousness and matter (trees, etc) is merely what consciousness looks like when seen from a particular perspective of mentation. This debate about realism is a kind of dress rehearsal for the mind body problem.

I think your approach has been correct. I also thought that that is arguing direct realism - that there is an objective unmediated reality 'out there', external to human perception that humans apprehend and see alike.

It's been interesting to read.

t's philosophy, and inherently messy subjects, so I say go for it. — schopenhauer1

You misunderstand me. I am asking how it is possible for us to build a robust case (the least 'messy' case possible) in this space. I am not saying that it shouldn't be done.

You are doing what I was saying we tend to do- inserting ourselves in the picture. You are coming at it from a post-facto manner. — schopenhauer1

I agree with you. Can we even talk about this subject without being hopelessly enmeshed in strictures of experience and our conceptual schemas?

Even language is a kind of sense that does not make actual contact with the things it is describing. Language's connection to reality seems as tenuous as that of visual perception.

Nicely summarized. :up: I avoid strong metaphysical commitments by claiming a form of pragmatism. I don't need to know what or why just how. No matter what we belief about the nature of reality and being, as soon as we walk out the door we behave as naïve realists. At some level the games we can play with conceptual framing and language don't matter all that much.

the vast majority of creatures, other than h.sapiens, get along perfectly well in their environmental niche without any requirement for conceptual analysis. — Wayfarer

I think this also holds for the Young Liberals I have known.

It's statistical reasoning, which makes films so bad. — ssu

For sure. But this was often at play, Pauline Kael made a similar argument over 40 years ago in 'Why Are Movies So bad? Or, The Numbers'. She was politically incorrect and brazen. Obviously written before TV got good.

The studios no longer make movies primarily to attract and please moviegoers;
they make movies in such a way as to get as much as possible from prearranged
and anticipated deals. Every picture (allowing for a few exceptions) is cast and planned
in terms of those deals. Though the studio is happy when it has a box-office hit, it isn’t
terribly concerned about the people who buy tickets and come out grumbling. They
don’t grumble very loudly anyway, because even the lumpiest pictures are generally an
improvement over television; at least, they’re always bigger. TV accustoms people to not
expecting much, and because of the new prearranged deals they’re not getting very
much. There is a quid pro quo for a big advance sale to television theaters: the project
must be from a fat, dumb bestseller about an international jewel heist or a skyjacking
that involves a planeload of the rich and famous, or be a thinly disguised showbusiness
biography of someone who came to an appallingly wretched end, or have an easily
paraphrasable theme, preferably something that can be done justice to in a sentence
and brings to mind the hits of the past. How else could you entice buyers? Certainly
not with something unfamiliar, original. They feel safe with big-star packages, with
chase thrillers, with known ingredients. For a big overseas sale, you must have “international” stars performers who are known—such as Sophia Loren, Richard Burton,
Candice Bergen, Roger Moore, Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Alain Delon, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen. And you should probably avoid complexities: Much of the new
overseas audience is subliterate. For a big advance sale to worldwide television, a movie
should also be innocuous: it shouldn’t raise any hackles, either by strong language or by
a controversial theme.

I think the beetle/box language game thing can be parked, but I guess you are saying that although humans 'create' green - it is not out there in reality - what is out there in reality is a particular light frequency that we experience as green. This can be objectively tabulated as a quality of the external world.

Is it not the case that humans experience specific light waves as color? Color is not a property in the world so much as a constructed perception, based on our visual apparatus.

I appreciate Rupert Spira's description of god as 'old language' for the transcendent and 'oneness'.

He had an astonishing mind.

One of those guess you had to be there moments? Despite that, hopefully you grasp the relevance. — Mww

Cool story. I think you need to change your name to Kantian Stargazer.



Thanks, so it was Cook's ship. I was trying to recall the details of this story with someone last week. It's the prefect example of what I was getting at.

One can imagine this kind of thing happening with concepts and frames of reference quite easily.

What are you to do, when perception presents to your reasoning mind something for which it has no conceptual representations already? — Mww

Indeed. I think this is a similar point @joshs makes in relation to how people assimilate (or fail to) unfamiliar information or fresh worldviews. We seem to need to have a partial appreciation (some conceptual representation) to take any useful step towards comprehension of the new or towards paradigmatic shifts in thought. Is something is truly unfamiliar to us are we blind to it?

:pray: :wink: Did you ever see that film 'Round Midnight with the great Dexter Gordon? I used to watch it regularly at an arthouse cinema near me, a flask filled with something nice in my pocket.

Some claim matter is neither created nor destroyed. How do you go about refuting this? For example: do you think caused and created are two different things? — ucarr

I know this is to someone else but it interests me to some extent.

I think causality is a provisional human understanding which seems to fit some matters. I don't think we know enough about reality or the universe to know that all things have causes or even what causality amounts to. I am not confident that we can look at our experience of our world and derive from this anything approaching a totalizing truth claim. At best, what we have are some testable, sometimes useful claims, but no overarching, demonstrable metanarrative. I think this gap or tension propels some of us into theism/mysticism/quantum woo or even radical politics, as the emotional need for universal narratives that can save humans and make sense of everything constantly overwhelms us.

If someone claims God is self-caused, how would you refute this refutation of {cause ⇒ effect} is always temporal? — ucarr

The problem with any claim like this - 'Leprechauns are self caused and are only seen by people who believe in them,' - are that seem to be more a jumble of words than statement about the world.

Is it not fairly dubious to claim self-creation for something which can't be demonstrated to be extant in the first place?